Saturday, September 29, 2007

Following the recommendation of Mojoey and others, I'm posting the whole atheist blogroll in the body of a post (rather than just the sidebar).

Since it's now more than 400 strong, Mojoey has suggested some fun blogroll activities, like having awards and such. This seemed like a fabulous idea until it hit me that I couldn't think of a single category that I'd be an obvious shoo-in for. After racking my brain a bit, the only thing I could come up with was "best friendly American exmormon atheist mom living in France." Then it hit me I might not even win that one, since I'm moving to Switzerland...

Oh, well, there's always the Bloggernacle's "Niblets". I'm seriously hoping to win one this next time. I hope I can count on my Bloggernacle friends to nominate me for "nicest evil villain" or something to that effect... ;^)

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Rudi is as charming as always, and we had a lovely dinner and an entertaining chat about how Mormonism works here in France. He also did some fun magic tricks which the kids loved, and I swear I only made him look at Nico's drawings a very little bit... ;^)

Monday, September 24, 2007

The babysitting job that I was splitting with Joy was at the house of the Jensens, who were non-members. It was fun having Joy along for a job like this one since it was one where the kids went to bed right off the bat, and all we had to do was hang out and be there to make sure nothing bad happened to them while their parents were gone.

This was a fantastic task since the Jensen's house was full of tempting delights. I almost would have been willing to pay to spend the evening there if I weren't being paid to do it.

First of all, be sure to check out the Humanist Symposium -- Lynet has written it up as an interlocking ruba'iyat!!!

I'd like to add one more link to an article that presents a view similar to what I said in my secularism post (found via friendly atheist): the director of Camp Quest has written a great article here explaining why (like me!) she'd prefer to talk to religious people about subjects like separation of church and state rather than re-hash familiar god/no-god arguments with people who have made up their minds. (BTW, they have a Camp Quest in Minnesota, and I am sooooo sending my kids there when they're older and spending a full Summer at the grandparents' house... :D )

I think the resolution/explanation was best expressed by Greta Christina, who asks "Why is this even a fight at all?": Good cop, bad cop. This is a truly excellent article that explains why it's not useful to expect the whole movement to adopt a single, uniform strategy. I'd actually been kind of thinking of the "new atheism" controversy in terms of of good-cop/bad-cop, but I hesitated to embrace that model because it makes the "good cop" look, I dunno, kinda insincere (as in "Well of course P.Z. Myers thinks you're a moron, but don't worry -- I don't think you're a moron..." *snicker*). But Greta does a good job of explaining how hardliners and moderates working together can be a legitimate political strategy and not just a manipulative interrogation technique.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm in From Around the Net, however, I haven't gotten into the Carnival of the Veil lately (can't seem to find the submission form for that one...) but some fun newer exmo blogs are there.

Plus, if you're curious for more details on the connection between my novel and the work of Judy Blume, I've written about it here: Not Quite Forever...

Saturday, September 22, 2007

I say "spontaneous" because I didn't have to do anything except gather up Nico's latest drawings and ask him what they were pictures of:

First he did a picture of a bat and a picture of a pteranodon, highlighting the difference in wing structure:

Then he drew a family of right whales: mommy, daddy, and baby:He pointed out that he included the daddy whale's zizi (which we learned about here and here) and explained that the baby whale is a girl whale.

Then he drew a cross-section of a dolphin, showing its skeleton and a fish it has just eaten:

He also drew a liopleurdon with a cross-section showing the skeleton:

...and did the same for the mosasaur:

I'd never heard of either one of those until my kids got hooked on those BBC specials and the corresponding website. It seems crazy, but I swear they have dinosaurs today that we didn't have when I was a kid...

And here's a picture of a squid with a cross-section showing its skeleton:If you look closely, you can see the squid's spine and ribs, as well as the bones in its tentacles...

Okay, it leaves something to be desired in terms of accuracy, but it's a pretty good guess for a five-year-old!!! He's turning six next week -- Happy Birthday Science-boy!!! :D

Thursday, September 20, 2007

I attended a very white high school in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Looking at my high school yearbook, out of my graduating class of 550, I count less than ten faces "of color." And when I say "of color" here, I'm including the Asian students and the kids from the A.B.C. program: the handful of kids brought in from inner-city school districts to get "A Better Chance."

About the only minority my school district had managed to integrate was the Jewish population. I can't really even estimate for you what portion of the student body was Jewish because they didn't look different and they didn't self-segregate. All I know is that many of my friends were Jewish and many were not, and either case was perfectly ordinary. You may think that integrating the Jewish population is no big deal, but considering the fact that a big chunk of my town had been explicitly chartered as "no blacks and no Jews," I feel like integrating the Jews at least showed some good improvement.

In history class, we learned about segregation. We learned about "separate but equal." We learned about the civil rights movement and "separate is inherently unequal" and about forced integration through busing. Just imagine this charming scene of all of these lily-white young faces learning such things from a history book instead of from real life experience. We also got to learn about things like "de facto segregation" and "white flight."

And thus my white liberal high school teachers encouraged me to think about racism.

I've talked about how difficult it is to avoid racism -- the gut level sentiment that those guys aren't just ordinary people like us -- and I concluded long ago that one of the most effective and painless techniques is to have people of different races and ethnicities interacting with each other in their daily lives, and especially to play together as children, as in Martin Luther King's dream.

But I figured that realistically I'd be one day be faced with a choice between sending my kids to an integrated school or a good school, and not have an option that includes both. As a high school student I fretted over this question, and I basically concluded that I would probably end up sending my future kids to a school system as white as the ones I attended because it wouldn't be fair to my kids to shortchange them on their education for the sake of my idealism.

Fast forward to today. I chose my neighborhood here in Bordeaux, France based on its proximity to downtown and to the tramway line, not the school district. And when my kids reached school age, I was pleasantly surprised with what they got.

It would be a whole additional article to describe how impressed I am with the quality of the education my kids are getting -- the curriculum, the materials, the outings, the programs, and how closely their development is followed. And I didn't have to make the unfortunate choice that I thought I'd have to make. The school is about a third white non-Muslim, about a third Muslim or of Muslim origin, and about a third "other" including black, asian, various hybrids, and many whose ethnic origins are difficult to identify precisely. From the names and from the fact that we're near a large synagogue, I assume some of the kids are Jewish as well. I wouldn't consider moving out to the suburbs to take my kids out of this school.

In France, the education is run 100% at the national level. Every kid of the same age in all of France has the same basic curriculum. The teachers are hired and assigned at the national level. In the U.S. -- as you know -- education is 100% local.

As a consequence, in the U.S. an individual school district or school can experiment with an innovative new program or teaching style that could prove to be very effective and catch on in other places. Impossible in France. As a consequence, in the U.S. if one community wants its kids learning an additional subject that the next town over doesn't want to bother with, they can add it to the public school curriculum. Again not possible in France. As another consequence, the disparity between the rich kid's education and the poor kid's education is dramatically greater in the U.S. than in France.

The disparity creates a vicious circle in the U.S. where bad schools get worse -- as parents who have an interest in their kids' education and who have the means to get their kids out of a poor school will do it.

I'm not claiming that French schools are perfect in the diversity-peace-and-love department. Far from it. Yet I feel like some very positive options exists in some cities here, and I haven't seen anything quite like it elsewhere. Watching the interactions among the kids, teachers, and parents at our school, I get the impression that nobody's even aware of the racial/ethnic differences. I can't tell if it's P.C. politeness or if it really is that after a certain amount of time living in the city you stop worrying about it. And the school does an impressive job of teaching the kids about France -- instilling them with the idea that they're all French -- while at the same time recognizing the diversity by teaching stories and songs from Africa and other countries and having programs where parents whose native language is not French (like me!) come in and read stories or sing songs in their native language.

Recently my little family took a trip by train, and as usual the kids spent most of the train ride drawing and coloring. Nico was getting ready to color Batman's chin, so he asked me for the "beige" (the French term for caucasian flesh-tone). I looked down at the handful of colored pencils I'd brought and found I'd forgotten that one. Before I had even a moment to think what to do, Nico said "That's okay, I'll just use brown," and grabbed the brown pencil out of my hand and colored Batman's face with it. He then proceeded to draw a bunch of other people and colored their smiling faces brown as well.

I feel like I shouldn't have been surprised: it's just a color, after all -- it doesn't mean anything.

Monday, September 17, 2007

"Well, here it is -- jumping-off point, and here we are one breath away from a sick world that's been crying out for what we can give it: truth! freedom! salvation!"

He was perfect for the part. I watched as Walter and Jake stood around the piano singing their number and Pinky played. Walter sang his part with gusto. He seemed to be happy to have been cast in this role, but really it was more that the production was lucky to have him than vice-versa.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

If you've got your finger on the pulse of the atheist community (like I do!) you're probably aware that there's a lot of discussion these days about following the gay community's example of increasing visibility (and consequently positive impressions) by being "out and proud" about one's unbelief. I think this is a great idea, and I'm all in favor of it!

To learn from their example, though, we need to do a bit of analysis of the differences between the atheist community and the gay community. I think the real biggie (in strategic terms) is that homosexuality is not contagious. In fact, that's one of the messages the newly-more-visible gay community has stressed: meeting gay people, befriending them, hanging out with them, touching them, etc., will not make you gay. It won't make your kids gay either. Not that there's anything wrong with being gay, but if for some reason you've decided that you don't want to be gay, inviting your gay neighbor to your backyard barbecue is not going to have any effect on your orientation either way.

Not so with atheism: indeed, quite the opposite. It's very common for someone to spend half a lifetime as a sincere and devout believer, then one day become an atheist and stay that way. And preliminary evidence seems to indicate that this is strongly linked with talking to pre-existing atheists.

And so we atheists are faced with a strategic dilemma: Should our "out and proud" campaign focus on demonstrating that we're ordinary, nice people, and (like gay people) we're your friends, neighbors, and family members? Or should we go straight for conversions, and skip this half-assed "we're here!" step? After all, they'll figure out that we're here and we're cool once they've become atheists themselves...

If you've been following this blog, you probably know that I favor the "friendly visibility" model for myself. I've talked about it a little here. In a nutshell, my reasons are the following:

1. It's easier to form alliances on critical political issues if we're willing to work with people who believe differently. Sure it's nice to agree on the ground rules of reasoning and what constitutes evidence, but I don't favor a strategy of saying "We can't discuss politics until after I've talked you out of your irrational faith." Some issues just can't wait that long.

2. As long as people agree on the importance of separation of church and state, it ultimately doesn't matter much what their beliefs are. Many believers are as passionate as we are about the separation of church and state because it protects their own freedom from having other beliefs imposed on them as well as preserving their church hierarchy from the corrupting influence of (secular) power. And it's that much easier to get believers on board with us if we make it clear that having a shared, secular public sphere is not a stealth tactic to destroy religion. (Many atheists disagree with this position -- see the Exterminator's recent article -- so there's definitely room for further discussion and analysis.)

3. A big problem with having a "zero tolerance" policy for taking religious belief seriously is the following: When you only discuss ideas with people who agree with you, there's a danger of starting with a good argument and then sending it through a group-think feedback loop until it turns into "I can't understand how anyone would be so stupid as to disagree with me on this point!!!" Really you're not doing yourself a favor when you work yourself into a state where you have no comprehension of another's viewpoint.

On the other hand, it appears that it's possible to go too far in the other direction. Via Friendly Atheist I saw the following quote by/about Harvard's Humanist chaplain:

"I have a religious personality, without a scintilla of religious belief," he says. "If it's an oxymoron to believe that people who have ceased to believe in God still need caring and community, then I'm proud to be a walking oxymoron."

Friendly Atheist (Hemant Mehta) indicates that the author of the article deliberately plays up the conflict in the atheist community, so I'll give Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein the benefit of the doubt here. But for his sake, I hope his quote was taken out of context and his very next line was: "But of course it's not an oxymoron, because -- as everyone knows -- atheists are just ordinary people who believe in a few fewer supernatural beings than average..." Otherwise his statement looks dangerously like he's granting the horrible stereotype that atheists are some sort of heartless monsters, and he's claiming to be some sort of exception because of his "religious personality." Holy expletive, talk about counterproductive!!! Just because you want a seat at the table, do you have to buy it for yourself by throwing your fellow atheists to the wolves??? Hopefully, though, the quote is not quite so bad in context, and I won't have to turn in my Humanist badge. ;^)

So while I would like to see atheists and believers getting along, you can see that it would be wrong to imagine that I'm the arch enemy of the "new atheists." In reality I'm thrilled about the new visibility of atheists. I'm thrilled to see atheism finally hitting the mainstream of American public discourse and recognized as a serious, legitimate viewpoint, as I discussed in the comments of my infamous nice vs. mean atheist joke post.

What I don't like is when atheists on either side make it look like the only two possibilities are that either you despise religious people and can't talk to them without trying to deconvert them or you're practically a church-goer yourself, and you're telling unapologetic atheists to shut up.

There's a third possibility, which is the following: to be out-and-proud with your atheism -- and be willing and happy to explain the reasons for your unbelief to anyone who asks -- yet also be willing to befriend believers and deal with them as reasonable people on a "let's agree to disagree" basis. In practical terms, I think that most atheists I know fall into this third category.

So, no, I don't think Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens should shut up. I certainly don't think PZ should shut up -- his blog is one of my favorite daily reads. Religion should absolutely be fair game for criticism. (Hey, if we respect our religious friends, we can't imagine they're too fragile to be challenged at all...) Naturally the critique of religion should itself be fair game to be criticized, as should be the critique of the critique of the critique... ;^)

And all of it in the spirit of productive discussion and friendly exchange of ideas.

First Paul's impromptu carnival from around the net! Like me, Paul is a total blogging addict who reads hundreds of blogs -- but not quite the same ones as I do -- so he's been thoughtful enough to make a list of some of the most thought-provoking articles he's read lately.

Then I got into the Carnival of Liberals!!! Sort of. This carnival has a policy of only posting the top ten posts, so I figured it was a long shot since I haven't been following this carnival and my post was more about foreign policy than economics. And I didn't make it to the top ten. But I lucked out because this time they decided to include "honorable mentions" as well -- yay!!!

Saturday, September 15, 2007

The thing is that little kids need to understand that there are some things they're not allowed to do, and "reasoning with them" doesn't always work. Sometimes you have no choice but to discipline them.

But what to do?

Spanking is bad, and a "time-out" doesn't work at our house because -- in all sincerity -- I'm afraid that if the kids pull at these hundred-year-old door handles too much they'll break, and we'll end up with a terrified kid waiting hours to be freed by a locksmith.

So the bad mom non-painful punishment I've hit on is to give the offender a "wedgie".

The advantage of the "wedgie" as punishment is that is distracts the kids from whatever naughty thing they're doing and gets them to cut it out, because the wedgie itself is entertaining -- really, it's hilarious!!! In fact, just threatening the wedgie generally leaves the offender rolling on the ground laughing (having forgotten about climbing up the bookshelf or screaming to have the scissors or something).

The disadvantage is that there's a risk that my kids will end up being the bad kids that think it's funny to give other kids wedgies at school.

Well, all I can say in my defense is that at least I haven't taken to giving them swirlies....

Thursday, September 13, 2007

This past weekend we took the kids to the Museum of Natural History of Bordeaux:

This isn't really a museum of the history of Biology: it would be more accurate to say that the museum is itself an artifact.

Here you can get a real taste of what some of the earliest natural history museums were like.

This museum has been displaying animal specimens to the public since receiving a (donated) private collection back in 1791!!!

So some of these specimens have been on display for well over 200 years!!!

They look it too...

Although most of them are probably no more than a hundred years old, some of the stuffed birds have noticeably faded over the years.

The museum is a bit of a living fossil since they actually take out subsets of their various collections from time to time to do a temporary exhibit highlighting a particular continent or species. I have to admit it's a little creepy, though, to be surrounded by all of these dead animals that have been preserved with arsenic and shown in a display case lo these many years. Particularly the collection of snakes in jars (which look like maybe some of their formaldehyde has evaporated over the past century or so...):

Still, the kids liked the museum. And it's fascinating to get a first-hand feel for the types of collections the early naturalists such as Linnaeus and Darwin were studying.

If you come here, it's quite possible you may be looking at some of the exact specimens observed by Darwin if he ever made a trip to Bordeaux and/or if naturalists and collectors in England were exchanging specimens with naturalists in France.

Now that I think of it, maybe I should have taken a closer look at their collection of beetles...

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

If you've forgotten what the excitement is about, here's a littlehint.

Now, logically at this point I should be reminding you that you have only one week left to get caught up on parts 1 and 2. However, if you compare the threecharactercharts, you'll note that I'm starting with a completely new batch of characters for part 3. So, while part 3 follows parts 1 & 2 (chronologically, in story-land), it doesn't depend on them.

That said, I'm pleased to note that the logs show an upswing in people reading Young Women's and Youth Conference over the past week or so, including people who read both together in one sitting (it apparently takes a few hours, according to the logs), as well as people who read a chapter or two and then come back for more. So maybe people are getting excited -- I know I am!!! :D

Friday, September 07, 2007

One of the positive advances credited to the feminist movement is the fact that it is no longer considered a virtue to stay with an abusive husband.

I'm not a historian, but I think it is reasonable to claim that a few generations ago (and right up to the present day in some places, even in the U.S.) it was expected that a man had the right to beat his wife and that the wife was not justified in leaving him over it. Today most modern, educated people are disgusted by the idea that wife-beating could ever have been considered admissable behavior. I suspect that the legal and cultural aspects of this change followed from economic realities: if a father's economic support means the difference between eating and starving, many will conclude that it is better to be occasionally beaten than to die of starvation and exposure. When women started to join the workforce and had greater potential to support their children themselves (if necessary), leaving an abuser became a reasonable choice. The question "but who will feed the children?" finally had a good answer.

Now I'd like to apply the "abusive husband/father" model to the analysis of foreign tyrants. I'd like to talk about this since it would appear that America is in the "regime change" business, thus it makes sense to do some analysis of how such adventures work in order to predict when and why some will welcome a liberator with open arms when others will see a hostile foreign invasion.

Without going out on too much of a limb here, I think that rule number one for being welcomed as a liberator is to convince the people in question that you have their best interests at heart. And a good first step for doing that is to actually have their best interests at heart. It's not enough to say "It is obvious that the dictator of country X is evil, therefore everyone will surely thank me if I kill him by any means I can."

It is true that brutal dictators typically use a great deal of force and intimidation to maintain their power. Yet there is a non-negligible component in which a home-grown dictator can convince his people that he's one of them, that he's interested in making their country great, and that any brutality and repression are necessary measures to protect the people from hostile foreign threats. Even in a case where anyone with eyes can see that the leader is, say, using the nation's resources to build himself a giant palace instead of building hospitals and schools, that doesn't mean that people will necessarily prefer a destructive foreign attack that ends with the country's resources being silently pumped into foreign pockets. It's not that different from the selfish man who mistreats his family yet shares some DNA and common interest with them and is bringing home at least part of his paycheck vs. an outsider who offers no tangible support.

There exist some Americans who explicitly favor a cynical policy of maintaining U.S.-friendly control over foreign resources regardless of whether it is fair or of the effects on the people living in the countries in question. But I think such Americans are a minority and that typically hawkish Americans are sincere in believing that a given military action will eventually lead to improved conditions for the people of the given foreign country. And in some cases this is probably an accurate assessment. But that doesn't mean that a military solution is always the best solution or that it's necessarily even always on the list of good solutions. Lately America's foreign policy is starting to look like a neighbor who says "Mr. So-and-so keeps beating his wife -- I should really do something about it... But what? I know! I'll go burn their house down! That will surely correct the problem."

I recently read an article (hat tip to Paul) that talked about evidence that babies as young as five months old prefer people who speak their own language over people who speak a foreign language. Frankly, I think humans tend to have a natural mental barrier that keeps them from empathizing with foreigners and from seeing immediately the human parallels between a foreign situation and one's own situation. It's not an insurmountable barrier, but it's one that takes a conscious effort to overcome, as I will illustrate below:

Now there are a lot of rumors floating around that Bush is planning an air strike against Iran. And people are probably saying that it's necessary because Iran is very close to having nuclear arms, and since its government is horribly repressive, Iranian nukes pose a grave danger to the entire world. I heartily agree that nuclear arms in the hands of the current government of Iran pose a grave threat to world peace. However, the assessment of the advantage of an air strike only takes into account the most familiar (American) perspective.

Let's use this situation to do a little thought exercise of picturing what it would be like to be a citizen of some other country. I'd like you to take a moment to imagine how this proposed air strike would look to you if you had been born (1) in Iran (2) in some other Muslim country (3) in China or North Korea.

Here are the responses that come to my mind:

For #1, I don't think any reasonable person in Iran is looking at the disaster in Iraq and thinking "I'd like to have that kind of help in my country too." Most likely, the average Iranian will see this attack as concrete evidence that there is a very real foreign threat and that their government is right to pursue a nuclear program in self-defense. An ordinary Iranian (who might otherwise have been pushing his government for needed reforms) would likely turn to his own government for military protection against the foreign danger, and view such things as political executions as necessary for national security -- in much the same way that Bush has persuaded many Americans that the use of torture is a necessary measure to ensure their safety.

For #2, I'd be very worried to see a pattern of the heavily armed U.S. launching unprovoked attacks against Muslim nations.

For #3, I'd be thinking, "So Bush gets to decide who can have nuclear technology and is ready to back up his decision with bombs? Are we next?" Even if China and North Korea have no fondness for Iran, they would logically start thinking about defensive treaties to try to contain American aggression. At worst, they could see U.S. military might as a threat to their own national security and use Bush's own "pre-emptive defense" doctrine to justify launching an attack on the U.S....

So, yes, Iranian nukes pose a grave threat to us. But so do Chinese and North Korean nukes, as do those in other countries as well as the various arms that have gone missing from the former Soviet Union. And think how much more of a danger they will present if World War III begins and we're the aggressor nation that started it.

My recommendation? Try to reclaim the moral high ground. Go back to respecting international treaties so that we can expect other countries to respect them as well. Cooperate -- really cooperate -- with honest people all over the world to recover lost weapons and stop international criminals. Don't be satisfied with "Hey, at least we're not as bad as the terrorists." Actually be the good guys so that there will be no confusion in anyone's mind as to who the bad guys are.

In other movie reviews news, I recently heard about a documentary that has gotten tons of praise and recommendations around the LDS-interest web: Burying The Past. It is a documentary about the Moutain Meadows Massacre, and -- according to what people have said about it -- this film is something of an antidote for everything September Dawn did wrong in its coverage of the tragedy. The director was kind enough to grant me an interview for Main Street Plaza which I posted here: Interview with documentary film-maker Brian F. Patrick.

Note that the film will be screened in Utah (in remembrance of the 150th anniversary of the tragedy) at the following locations:St. George: 7 pm Sunday, Sept. 9 at the Flood Street Theaters, 140 N 400 E.Salt Lake City: 7 pm Tuesday, September 11 at the Tower Theater, 876 E 900 S.

And I have plans to write some more for my own blog here soon instead of just writing for other blogs, so stay tuned!!! :D